[North America] miscellaneous thoughts on a 2012 N. A. conference

[Robert Hollingsworth]

Number One Miscellaneous Thought: I'm available to help organize this thing.

2. I agree with others that we'll have to work fast to get something solid in place by April or May.

3. Settling on Denver area and working with GITA again makes sense, given the compressed calendar, not having to expend lots of energy deciding where to meet.

4. Marketing the conference could be a tricky task.  While a 2012 event will be necessarily smaller in scope, I think marketing it simply as a miniaturized FOSS4g Denver 2011 -- fewer workshops, fewer presentations, fewer exhibitors, fewer attendees... for fewer dollars -- won't be a very compelling draw.  

5. We can make a virtue of the reduced size by selling the conference as lots of face-to-face contact with people from different industries, putting core developers, integrators, analysts, techs, 'pure' users, managers, and 'suits' in a circle around a white board and get them talking (sort of the un-conference approach, which might be more adaptable to different attendance numbers, 200-500, which we really can't predict terribly well right now), suggest this is "define your own conference" for 2012 and beyond, etc. 

6.  I'd like to recruit aggressively for attendees from outside as well as inside the developer-integrator community.  Would be nice to be able to tap into identifiable user communities by building alliances with other orgs, such as some that have been mentioned in other posts.

I guess that's enough miscellaneous thoughts...for now...

Robert Hollingsworth
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